How power outages can affect your business

As a California business owner, you might not realize how important electricity can be for daily operations, or at the very least, you might not know what longstanding outages can cost your company.

Through severe weather or other unforeseen events, having the right insurance policies in place that account for your business not running normally can be immensely helpful for reducing recovery costs. Several Michigan companies discovered this, when they were in the dark during a normally lucrative time.

According to a Kalamazoo Gazette article, a power outage last Sunday was detrimental to area businesses that depend on their weekend breakfast crowd. Kalamazoo had nearly 2,000 residents and companies without power after a squirrel crawled into a Consumers Energy substation.

"If that was my only restaurant, this would be a very hard week," Mike Leeuw, owner of EMA Enterprises, which owns Andrea's Café among other restaurants told the news source. "We count on Saturdays and Sundays to make the week even or a success. We were closed the whole day and thank God we didn't lose food, but all of downtown lost the church crowd."

An Associated Press report said that every day, 500,000 Americans lose power for at least one hour. Furthermore, those outages cost the economy $80 billion to $188 billion per year.

Matthew Burian, president of Millennium Restaurant Group, said that his businesses were not harmed by last Sunday's outage, but one of his eateries lost power recently and it cost the restaurant its entire dinner service.

Without the right California business insurance policy, or set of policies, it could be exceedingly difficult for you to recover from time not being open. Whether it is for one hour, one week or one month, it could be costly.